Joseph Wright of Derby and George Stubbs - British painting - Шедевры мировой живописи - Каталог статей

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Joseph Wright of Derby and George Stubbs

Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797) and George Stubbs (1724-1806) A most interesting figure was Joseph Wright of Derby, an able enough painter with a remarkable range of interests. He was conventionally London-trained in portraiture, and made the, by then, conventionally necessary trip to Italy but it is to his native Midlands that he returned in the end. In his work there comes through something of the hard-headed, practical yet romantic excitement of the dawn'of the Industrial Revolution. He saw the world in a forced and sharpening light'- sometimes artificial, the mill-windows brilliant in the night, faces caught in the circle of the lamp, or the red glow of an iron forge, casting mon-strous shadows. This was an old trick - deriving from Caravaggio and the Dutch candlelight painters - but with it Wright brought out a sense of exploration and exploitation - scientific, intellectual and commercial, the spirit of the Midlands of his time. His patrons were men like the industrialist Arkwright of the spinning Jenny, and Dr Priestley, the poetic seer of the new science (both of whom he painted). The "Experiment on a Bird in the Air-Pump", painted in 1768, is perhaps his masterpiece. Air-pumps were in considerable production in the Midlands at the time, but this is not merely an excellently painted and composed study of scientific experiment. It is raised to the pitch of a true and moving drama of life by the tender yet un-sentimental exploration of a human situation. The bird in the globe will die, as the vacuum is created in it; the elder girl on the right cannot bear the idea and hides her face in her hands, while the younger one though half-turned away also, looks up still to the bird with a marvellous and marvelling expression in which curiosity is just overcoming fear and pity. The moon, on the edge of cloud, seen through the window on the right, adds another dimension of weird-ness and mystery. This is a picture that exists on many levels but, as it was not expressed in terms of the classical culture of the age, Wright's subject pictures were for long not given their due. He himself stood apart from that (classical) culture; although he early became an associate of the Royal Academy, he soon quarrelled with it. George Stubbs presents in some ways a similar case: he never became a full member of the Royal Academy. He was, for his contemporaries, a mere horse-painter. In the last few years he has been much studied, and his reassess-ment has lifted him to the level of the greatest of his'time. His life has been fairly described as heroic. The son of a Liverpool currier, he supported himself at the begin-ning of his career" in northern England by painting por-traits, but at the same time started on his study of anatomy, animal and human, that was to prove not only vitally im-portant to his art but also a new contribution to science. Stubbs was one of the great English empiricists. He took a farm-house in Lincolnshire and in it, over eighteen months, he grappled with the anatomy of the horse. His models were the decaying carcasses of horses, which he gradually stripped down, recording each revelation of anatoT my in precise and scientific drawing. The result was his book The Anatomy of the Horse, a pioneering work both in science and art. All his painting is based on knowledge drawn from ruthless study, ordered by a most precise observation. In the seventies, his scientific interests widened from anatomy to chemistry, and helped by Wedgwood, the enlightened founder of the great pottery firm, he experimented in enam) el painting. His true and great originality was not on-conventional lines, and could not be grasped by contemporary taste.
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